Six hour chilli

I’ve enjoyed making and eating chilli ever since I was in university. It has a lot of appeal for your average student:

You can make it in bulk and live off it for a few weeks

You can make it spicy enough that you start bleeding out of your nose (and thus totally impress all your friends)

It’s dead simple and really hard to screw up

The great part is that really once you have the basic ingredients you can just go nuts, vary up the ratios, add extra bits and pieces, whatever you fancy. Eventually though I discovered that I was getting a bit too wild and really wanted to nail down a basic “good” recipe to work from. It took a couple of tries but here it is. It’ll take around six hours to cook, an extra hour for prep depending on how lazy/drunk you are.

Ingredients

2 cups chopped onions

2.5 lb lean ground beef

56 oz diced tomatoes (canned works just fine)

2 tsp chilli powder

2 tsp chilli pepper flakes

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp cayenne pepper

1/8 cup cilantro leaves (I use dried but fresh is probably good too)

1/2 tsp chipotle chilli pepper powder

1/2 pint stout or other dark beer

2 cups red wine (I tend to use merlot)

2 cups beef broth

1/8 cup tomato puree or 1/4 cup tomato ketchup

~3-4 tsp coarsely ground black pepper

3×12 oz cans of mixed beans

2-3 large bell peppers (red and/or green), chopped

Instructions

Fry the onions in some olive oil until they start to turn translucent, then throw in the beef and stir until it browns all over.

Add into a large pot with the tomatoes, spices, wine, beer and broth

Cover and simmer for 2 hours, stirring periodically (use the remains of the stout to help you get through this)